Shinelle Peters was excited by the opportunity to see her favourite musician, Morgan Wallen, in Edmonton this September after standing front row at his concert a few years ago.
There was no question in her mind she was willing to spend the money as soon as tickets went on sale, but she wasn’t prepared for the challenges to come.
Peters wanted to go to the Saturday concert, but because of the staggered sale dates, she bought tickets to Friday in case Saturday tickets sold out before she had a chance to purchase them.
She ended up with tickets to both concerts and made the decision to resell her Friday tickets to another fan.
“These tickets are really expensive, so I wanted to have a safe place to sell them,” said Peters.
“I didn’t put them on Marketplace because I didn’t want to get scammed so I used what should have been a secure website.”
Peters posted the pair of tickets on Stub Hub for $795 each — face value for the pair including fees.
The tickets were only on the website a week before being sold, but at a fraction of the listed price.
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“I received an email saying, ‘Congratulations your tickets sold’ and I went ‘Woohoo!’” says Peters. “I checked my account, and they were posted for sale for $2.48.”
Peters quickly contacted Stub Hub to find out why the tickets — worth $1,500 for the pair — sold for less than three dollars.
The customer service agent checked her account and was able to see the price dropped about three minutes before the sale was made — and said because it was done in her account, there was nothing the company could do.
Peters insists she didn’t change the price, suggesting the account must have been compromised.
Later the same day, her email account was flooded with spam emails, and her tickets were reposted on Stub Hub for nearly $700. each.
“I feel like my account was compromised and they are doing nothing to protect me as a seller, saying it’s my fault,” said Peters.
Global News contacted Stub Hub and was told only that they were looking into the situation.
In the meantime, Peters posted her story to social media and received multiple responses from people saying the same thing had happened to them.
“I’ve had tons of people come forward and say this happened to me,” said Peters. “These companies are saying, ‘It’s not our problem, we’re not doing anything about it.’”
Cybersecurity expert Tom Keenan says it’s important to be very careful when selling things online.
His theory is someone was able to take over her account, but says the question is how and why it wasn’t flagged by Stub Hub.
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“There are a couple red flags here,” said Keenan. “One of them is a ridiculous change in the price. Right away that should be something that Stub Hub should have an alert on.”
Keenan also said a different IP address making that change should trigger a confirmation — but he says there isn’t a lot of motivation for companies to follow up on fraud cases like this one, so it falls to the seller to push for action.
In the meantime, Keenan says it’s important to have measures like multi-factor authentication and different passwords for every online account to help keep them safe.
“We’re going to need more protection because everybody’s relying on this stuff now,” said Keenan. “Most people don’t have the deep technical expertise but what they should have is healthy skepticism.”
Peters hopes if she can’t get her tickets or money back, her story will serve as a warning for others to read the fine print and monitor accounts closely when selling things online.
“It’s made what should have been a really exciting experience into a really frustrating and heartbreaking one where I’m left going, ‘What do I do?’”
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